The Contractor

Allison Blue is a top-notch (plus hot) Silicon Valley cryptographer - and she is a cryptographer even when she is being a spy, doing highly-paid contract work for a terrifyingly omniscient government agency. She only took the field operative training, and the high-capacity Glock, to amuse herself - and to feel part of something dangerous.

But danger proves surprisingly unamusing when first the Israelis, then the Chinese, and finally her own agency, all start asking very insistently that she steal her company's revolutionary quantum encryption technology for them - and her double-life quickly gets much more complex, and much more double-life-threatening, than she ever bargained for.

Will the unflappable Mossad agent with the dreamy steel-blue eyes protect her when the shit comes down? Will the mad-dog Chinese operatives with the dual double-barreled pistol grip shotguns disappear her in a hail of buckshot? Will her own government agency ultimately lock her up in a room, and throw away the room?

The final result of this dizzying conflict will only be determined in a balls-out, five-way firefight in the server room of a highly-secure office complex in the middle of Silicon Valley. And where Allison will go afterward, should she survive, is yet to be determined . . .

This 10,000-word novella combines all of the best motifs of cyberthriller writer Michael Stephen Fuchs: over-the-top action, blitzingly new technologies, a conflicted motorcycle-riding female protagonist who is handy with both computers and guns, wildly complex action set-pieces - and, finally, a philosophical meditation on what the hell we're supposed to be doing with our lives down here, especially when everything is coming down around our ears.

Also included in the short story collection, Don't Shoot Me In The Ass, And Other Stories

Praise for Michael Stephen Fuchs

"Just what a technothriller should be: taut, violent, smart, and very, very technical. As if The Da Vinci Code were written by someone who wasn't an idiot." - Cory Doctorow

"Guns, blackmail, computers, unfathomable corruption, angry young Taoists, and a bloody quest for a mysterious manuscript. Fuchs seems to operate on the narrative principle of 'when in doubt, put in a firefight.'" - Kirkus Reviews